Commentary Series

Mon-Thurs 8:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Sundays at 10:55 a.m.

More than 50 commentators provide perspective and opinion about current events, topics of interest, and often showcase the work of writers and storytellers. The VPR Commentary Series is produced by Betty Smith-Mastaler.

Federal tax changes could seriously affect Vermont’s nonprofit organizations that rely on contributions to deliver mission-related services. With the new legislation enacted in December, taxpayers can now choose a doubled standard deduction or can elect to itemize their charitable contributions up to sixty percent of their adjusted gross income.

“Build it and they will come” is the oft-misquoted meme from the classic movie Field of Dreams. And in the case of the proposal by CoreCivic, a private prison firm, to build and lease back to the State a 925-bed prison in Franklin County, this meme embodies the worst fears of the corrections reform movement.

On his way to a National Ballet performance of Sleeping Beauty, a young boy heard its plotline for the very first time: A man approaches a sleeping woman he has never before met and kisses her. Never schooled on Disney, and allowed to defy gender stereotypes to follow his love for ballet, this boy asked his mother, “Isn't that sexual harassment?”

When you told your mom you loved herbefore you caught the bus this morningyou meant it in the way a teenager means itwhen they kiss their mother on the cheek,cereal on their breath,backpack on their shoulder,head in a million places.

There’s a lovely old Welsh tune, "The Ash-Grove" that elementary school music teachers and scout leaders often choose for their kids to sing. In it, lost love is recalled under the graceful boughs of the lovely and practical Ash tree.

I once bought ten acres of woods in New Hampshire because they looked so much like my Adirondacks. The county forester walked them with me and showed me how I could harvest them sustainably for firewood. But save these, he said, tapping a white ash. These are your most valuable trees.

Most people would agree that empathy is a good thing — the ability to see things from another point of view, to put yourself in another’s shoes, to listen and understand. But in this season of discontent, even empathy has become a question of controversy.

The publication this month of Green Mountain Scholar: Samuel B. Hand commemorates the legacy of a man who — in the process of changing his own thinking about Vermont — changed the way we understand our history, even today

Since the Great Recession ended in June, 2009, changes in technology, disruption of traditional industries, and innovation in the workplace have occurred at a faster pace than ever before. After an unprecedented loss of nearly nine million jobs, the U.S. economy is fully recovered and continues to add jobs, and consumer confidence has reached its highest level since two thousand.

Up until recently, I had only known the National Rifle Association as the sporting turned Second Amendment lobbying group that has fought against proposed gun restrictions, including ones for the AR-15, the assault-style rifle used in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that left seventeen students and teachers dead.

In 1981, a year after the Religious Right abandoned Jimmy Carter, a born-again evangelical Christian, for Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham remarked, “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”